The Papiamento is a language or dialect spoken on the islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao, these islands are geographically located off the coast of Venezuela. Orthographically it has two forms of writing: the etymological one, based on the Spanish dialect used in Aruba, and the phonetic one, which is used in Curaçao and Bonaire.
Papiamento is derived from the word "papia" , a transformation from colloquial Spanish and Portuguese. According to the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy, the term Papiamento is defined as follows: ”1. Paper, speak confusedly. It is said of the language or creole language of curaçao, in the Caribbean.
Papiamento was declared the official language of Aruba as of 2003, and in Curaçao and Bonaire as of 2007. Its writing or grammar has been its own since 1976. According to some writers, this language dates back more than 500 years. The dialect developed over time by itself, through contact between the different dialects that were living on these islands. Therefore Papiamento is a mixture of the Spanish language with Portugueseand other African languages, so it is based on a Creole-African-Portuguese that the slaves brought from Africa, which has progressed through time thanks to the colonizations and the geographic location of the islands, adopting a great influence especially of the Spanish language, due to its proximity to countries like Colombia and Venezuela.
In its written form, Papiamento has its own grammatical structure, so it has a linguistic independence with respect to the Spanish language, as any other language has. Its lexicon comes from the Portuguese and Spanish languages, however, it may or may not be understandable to those who speak these languages if they do not get used to it.
